Edgar Beach sent:

>Is it fair for me to assume that the majority of serious
>(for lack of another word) music lovers also cannot tolerate much of
>todays disharmonic stuff? Again this is an assumption and not a fact.

Why is it necessary to make such an assumption?  (BTW, most of "today's"
music is far less disharmonic than it used to be.  12-tone music, except
in shorter passages, is hard to come by.) What is far more important is
that listeners ENJOY serious music, of whatever kind.  I find that it
is often extremely difficult for some to accept that others' tastes could
possibly be different from theirs: There must be something WRONG with
"those" people.

I have watched audiences of 100 or more at the San Francisco Contemporary
Music Players listen in rapt attention and cheer highly atonal works,
so I know many enjoy such stuff.  I enjoy a fair share, but not all,
of such stuff.

Why?  It's better to ask, "How." For me, a majority of the time, it's a
strong intellectual satisfaction in hearing a presentation of "ideas,"
of all kinds, laid out in a perceptable form, usually with a degree of
variety and contrast.  Endless dissonance without variety drives me up
the wall.

In a minority of occassions with "atonal" music, my reaction is romantic:
I "feel" with the music and have "heartfelt" emotions to go with the
experience.  The Berg Violin Concerto is a classic example of this for
me, but there are a fair number of others.

The majority of the time I'm dissatisfied with new music, atonal OR
tonal: Let's face it, the majority of music is mediocre-- most composers
are not Beethovens.  You shouldn't confuse the rampant mediocrity of
atonal music with its mode of expression-- although atonality, since it
can be intellectually justified on paper, provides a far better cover
than a retrograde tonal composition would.

I do feel--with respect to my particular bias, which I have learned never
to ASSUME others share--that writing a truly beautiful, harmonized melody
nowadays is more difficult to bring off than an entire atonal symphony.
Where are the truly great melodies of the last 50 years in serious music?

Jeff Dunn
[log in to unmask]
Alameda, CA

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